When childhood friends Duffy Driediger, Darcy Hancock, Sean Hawryluk and Ryan Peters were ready to self-record their first album back in 2005, they had a very specific sound in mind for Ladyhawk's debut. “We wanted to have a real live-sounding record,” Hancock explains. “We did it all live in the same room because we refused to wear headphones.”
The finished product, however, was not what the band members had imagined. “It came off sounding really thin and all the same,” Hancock says. The band tried to re-master the album twice, but saw little improvement. When Ladyhawk signed with Jagjaguwar Records later that year, the band accepted the label’s offer to re-record its debut.
After almost two years of constant touring and the release of the 2007 EP Fight For Anarchy, the band was ready to start recording another album. Eschewing the traditional studio setting, Ladyhawk settled on an abandoned farmhouse behind a strip mall in the guys' hometown of Kelowna, British Columbia. It lacked certain creature comforts (most notably modern plumbing), but it was cheap, and the band could play there 24 hours a day.
Hancock said he and his bandmates had hoped the house's relative isolation would help distance them from the distractions of everyday life. But the decision to let a former record exec film their recording sessions came back to haunt them. “It was actually really annoying,” Hancock recalls. “It’s just hard to be yourself because you know that people are going to watch it later.”
Despite the presence of the elephantine camera in the room, Ladyhawk emerged from the drafty farmhouse 10 days later with Shots, an album Hancock says finally captured the raw energy of the band's music that had been lacking on its debut. “We didn’t use any other effects on the album, just the sound of the room,” he says. “It sounds like the place we recorded it in, and I don’t think we could repeat that.”
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For more animal-esque music, news, and issues, tune in to Kitty Mowmow's Animal Expo online at www.thecapstone.ua.edu, Sunday nights 8-10 central.
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